Zen and the Art of Vacuum Cleaning

Everything I touched this week crumbled.

And now it’s ending, day number 7, the grand finale, with a bullet. The clouds have hung heavy for five straight days, dropping thick, fat raindrops, on and off, throughout the valley.

I pull myself out of bed, throw on some clothes, brush my hair and clip it back and brace myself for the early morning cold. When I put the car key into the door, it jams, stuck halfway in. I’m shivering, my fingers are swollen as I jimmy the key a bit. No luck. This is how it begins.

I unlock the car through the passenger side with the wind biting through my clothes, every muscle contracts and shakes. My head is congested beyond belief. It is as if my sinuses are a factory that manufactures gobs of mucus to be packaged and warehoused in my tonsils. Even though I’m running late for work I need Starbucks to soothe my scratchy throat and supply me with some instant personality. I drive 4 miles out of my way to get to one with a drive-through.

I make it to the gym at 7am, right on time. I open the door and grab my coffee but the lid is loose and it drops down hard and splashes all over the console.

I don’t have time to clean it properly plus I’m freezing so I grab a cloth shopping bag that is lying on the back seat and hastily wipe up the spill. I then scrunch up the bag and press it into the cup holder to absorb any remaining liquid and leave it there to dry.

I have to open the gym. It’s now 7:05 am and I’m cold, sticky, congested and late.


Enter into my life... The Dyson…

My first task of the day is to vacuum. In the four years I’ve worked at the gym we’ve gone through numerous replacements of the same model vacuum cleaner, until last week. Last week is when the gym bought a Dyson. Pause for applause. Even gym members have noticed and commented.

The Dyson looks like something from the future. I size it up and figure it must have cost the gym a good $400 to $600. I figure out how to turn it on, so far so good. Then I instinctively move my foot to press the step to decline the handle. No step.

I search the machine up and down. It’s beautiful with its clear tank, twisty metallic colored hose and bright turquoise ball-style wheel but I can’t use it until I find the button that releases the handle. Then I realize that all I have to do is tilt it, there’s no button or step to press, nothing more is needed. Simple. But sometimes the simplest solution takes a while to figure out.

So I’ve turned it on and tilted the handle and now I can push it across the scratchy red gym carpet and suck up stray lint with satisfaction as I daydream about the past week. It wasn’t a good one.

There are times when the earth alters just slightly, but enough to cause a person to question what she once thought was real. Sometimes it’s something slight like a key that won’t fit into a lock anymore, or a head that feels heavier than normal or rain clouds that float too low for too many days. Sometimes just a few words can distort reality and send the whole planet off kilter, spinning everything into an irregular orbit.

Somebody at the front counter needs to buy an energy drink so I shut off the vacuum and rush over, pressing buttons on the register. The drawer pops open and pushes everything in front of it onto the floor, my purse, my notebook, cleaning spray and a bottle of water.

Once I pick that up, I go back to vacuuming and back to my thoughts. There’s an idea of me, a picture that keeps morphing into other images, a watercolor painting that won’t dry with colors that bleed into themselves to form something completely different.

I feel so misunderstood.

I want people to really see me but I can’t Photoshop or touch up or airbrush their thoughts. People see me through their own lens and how can I fix that when I keep changing to myself every instant.

I’m thinking all this while people funnel into the gym, one by one, and time ticks on the clock and I'm rounding a corner continuing to vacuum. The Dyson sucks up debris like there’s no tomorrow. Then I hear a slurpy clunk and out of the corner of my eye I think I see a small brown wiry object, a bobby pin, get eaten and then the vacuum shuts off.

Nooooooooo.

I turn the vacuum over hoping to see the culprit clog sticking out the bottom. No luck. I twist the brush bar a little but it’s all clear. Looks like I’m going to have to operate, a scary thought considering I can’t even unlock doors without breaking them. I must find a screwdriver, open up the cleaner head somehow, figure out how to remove the hose and dislodge the offending object.

Meanwhile, swallowing is a huge ordeal because of the thick goop stuck in the back of my throat, my skin is heating up, my eyes feel heavy and my stomach is speaking in alien tongues, but there’s a list of chores I must complete so I abandon the Dyson for the time being.

Ah, I see that last Sunday I used permanent instead of dry-erase marker on the otherwise erasable cleaning chart, nice touch.

I begin to disinfect the weight machines with a white rag, lemony astringent and plastic gloves and my thoughts of poor, misunderstood me linger seductively, beckoning me to indulge and dwell.

But here’s the thing.

The sun has come out for the first time in five days allowing a view of the mountains to the north. The day is crisper than a drop of water on a leaf and I can see every ridge of the mountains. Snow has fallen on top of them and every speckled powdery crevice is clear. The sky is a perfect blue.

And the members of the gym are in good moods today. For every one grouchy person there are 5 who know my name and wish me a good day. I’m sure part of this newfound joy is caffeine induced, but that doesn't matter because I feel cheerful as I clean the equipment.

I look over toward the vacuum cleaner from a different place in the room. I see it from a different perspective and notice that the plug is not in the outlet. Oops, I guess I should have checked that first. I plug it in and it starts. Simple. No operation necessary.

I go back to my thoughts with clearer insight now, looking at my thoughts from a new perspective. There's nothing for me to control or change. Everything is simple.

I am not a static picture. I change to myself with every instant like dripping watercolors blending together.

So in this way the Dyson, in addition to being a great vacuum cleaner, this past Sunday, after a long week of disappointment, was also my Zen master.